Building the perfect battery is a hard problem. Batteries either too inefficient or too expensive or too unstable to power the renewable gadgets of the future. But a team of Harvard scientists just built a new kind of battery with a molecule found in food, and it could solve these problems.
The molecules in question are quinones, organic compounds that happen to be identical to molecules found in rhubarb. The Harvard team built the batteries by harnessing the electrochemistry of the quinones rather than using an expensive metal like platinum as an electrocatalyst.
via Gizmodo
